Furthermore, I’m not sure why SIP disallows root’s write permissions anyway. Though the procedures of getting to the MacOS Recovery menu without using the Command key and disabling System Integrity Protection are not all that difficult, they were a pain to figure out.

Thereafter, it is fairly simple to disable System Integrity Protection via the following command:Īll that’s left is to reboot by going to the Apple Menu and clicking on “Restart”. However, I needed a terminal, and it might not be readily apparent, but to get it, you click on the “Utilities” menu in the top menu bar (see the screenshot above), and then select “Terminal”. Now, in the main window, there are plenty of tasks that can be launched. The Apple host will reboot and the Recover Mode screen will be presented: To do so, open up the Terminal and type the following commands: Instead, I figured that there had to be a way to do it from the MacOS terminal.Īfter digging through documentation and man pages (I’ll spare you the trials and tribulations of trying to find answers 😛 ), I finally found that, yes, one CAN reboot MacOS into Recovery Mode without the command key. Yes, yes, I know that MacOS offers the ability to set different key combinations, but then those would still have to be trapped by VMWare Fusion during boot. However, my situation called for Recovery Mode from a virtual machine and using a non-Apple keyboard (so no Command key). That’s all fine and dandy if it is a physical host and one has an Apple keyboard. Essentially, to get into Recovery Mode, one just has to hold Command+R when booting up the system.

Typically, this wouldn’t be all that difficult when following the instructions provided by Apple. I’m not going to rant about how absurd it is to disallow the root account the ability to write, but instead I’d like to present the method of disabling System Integrity Protection.įirst of all, one needs to get into the Recovery Mode of MacOS. That “feature” is known System Integrity Protection. In this case, I found that even the root account couldn’t write to certain directories that MacOS deemed special. I was recently reminded of the myriad reasons why I don’t like MacOS, and one of them is that the OS should never stand in the way of what the operator wants to do. My love for Apple and especially MacOS does not run deep.

Recovery mode in mac os vmware